I has Windows 7

[Salamok]

I have a RAID 0 SATA2 (3/Gbs) main drive, but it doesn't seem very fast. I would expect it to be a *little* faster than a plain ol' single SATA drive, but maybe my perspective is off.

If you are running w7 with over 4gb of ram it doesn't seem to use the swap file much.  RAID 0 is mainly used to increase your write speed, doesn't do much for your read speed (maybe some seek time improvement depending on your controller).  

[Salamok]

I'm thinking going for SSD disks for my win7 install at some point, 80 or 120GB should suffice and give a nice speed boost which is actually noticeable in the real world.

Careful what you choose there is still some real crap out there, saga of the crap: part 1, part 2, part 3.

edit: Nice quotes from part 3:

The largest SSD maker in the world is Samsung. Samsung makes the drives offered by Apple in its entire MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup. Samsung makes the drives you get if you order a Lenovo X300. In fact, if you're buying any major OEM system with an SSD in it, Samsung makes that drive.

It's just too bad that those drives aren’t very good.

and

Don't ever opt for the SSD upgrade from any of these OEMs if you've got the option of buying your own Indilinx or Intel drive and swapping it in there.

edit2: and to rerail back to w7, windows 7 is the only OS that currently supports the TRIM command that will keep your next generation of SSD's performing in tip top shape over time.

[Yegolev]

Might I recommend picking up a Caviar Black 1TB (or 2TB) drive if you haven't replaced your HDD in a while. I picked up two of the 1TB and it's insanely fast.

I installed a new and fast 150GB WD a few months ago when I started this Win7 nonsense.  If I put things on C:, I'd maybe get the 1TB but it would be wasted space, or just another thing that annoyed me if I did use it.

So here I am after the update to retail W7.  Meet the new OS, same as the old OS.  Turns out grub won the fight and continues to control my boot images.  The Easy Transfer tool lived up to its name, although it is odd what things survived the transfer.  For example, my Steam shortcut is nowhere to be seen but the Impulse one is acting as if nothing happened.  Fallen Earth is missing the icon but otherwise seems to work (Icarus is very proud of the 8.5 they got from IGN, God bless 'em).  Firefox started up but all of my add-ons were gone.  Well, I can't complain since it saved me a bit of work.  My wife isn't likely to be terribly happy about reinstalling but I think she will get over it.

It has not asked me for my previous key, interestingly.  I do have three XP keys handy (and two CDROMs), in case it does.

[tgr]

I'm thinking going for SSD disks for my win7 install at some point, 80 or 120GB should suffice and give a nice speed boost which is actually noticeable in the real world.

Careful what you choose there is still some real crap out there

Yeah, a friend of mine's heavily into the whole SSD stuff, he says a few of the intel drives are sweet so I'll probably be getting one of those.

I've been postponing SSD for a while due to the reports of monstrously bad write performance and lack of longevity, but I'm assuming they're starting to become speedy and just good quality in general by now.

[Kitsune]

RAID makes Baby Jesus cry, don't RAID.  If your RAID controller burns out at some point in the future, you'd better be able to find that exact same model controller, or your drives will be paperweights.  You can't just shove an array of drives into any controller and expect it to be able to read them; most controllers have their own unique addressing method and are very much not compatible with drives that were set up with another controller.

Unless a client has some sort of external backup storage set up for disaster recovery, I will always strongly discourage them from having a RAID configured.  Of course, I always want them to have external backups just on general principle, but if the server shits itself and dies one morning, at least a non-RAID drive can be plugged into another computer to pull the data off.

[Engels]

Most people setting up raid these days are using on-board controllers like the ICHR Intel series. If their controller dies, their entire system is pretty much horked anyways. They'd have to replace the motherboard, ostensibly with the same one, with the same ICHR chipset. It makes sense for some situations, such as a workplace where everyone has the same model Dell and has a 3 year service contract.

The other situation where it makes sense is if you're setting up a pure gaming rig and you want Raid 0. As long as you understand that a failed controller or a failed drive means everything is gone bye-bye. Then again, as Trippy pointed out, 'real world' benchmarks show only marginal gains with motherboard raid 0 configurations.

[TripleDES]

I've been running Solaris for three years now after getting an anti-Microsoft shitfit during the Vista beta. Now I've installed this free copy of Win7 I've gotten, and it's tempting me to switch back. I'd be giving up the luxuries of an Unix command line, MPD and ZFS, but at least I can run Photoshop and Office again. But having to deal with the virus and malware shit again...

[Yegolev]

How many luxuries could you be missing out on by ditching Solaris?

[TripleDES]

Hey, I like nerdy shit. 

[Yegolev]

Yea, me too, but I have standards.

[schild]

But having to deal with the virus and malware shit again...

I haven't had to deal with malware or viruses for over a decade. If you have to on any windows box, you're doing it wrong.

[Delmania]

I'd be giving up the luxuries of an Unix command line, MPD and ZFS, but at least I can run Photoshop and Office again. But having to deal with the virus and malware shit again...

Viruses - Security Essentials: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
UNIX Command Line - Windows Powershell:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757%28VS.85%29.aspx

[Ingmar]

But having to deal with the virus and malware shit again...

I haven't had to deal with malware or viruses for over a decade. If you have to on any windows box, you're doing it wrong.

But you've had to deal with preventing them.

[Sky]

But he's a winner, the 1,000,000th visitor. Why shouldn't he click for his FREE Xbox 360?

I do hate humanity for the most part. Even with the little bit of internet usage I observe in the general public here, it's quite easy to understand why malware removal is such a lucrative business for local pc repair shops.

[Yegolev]

But having to deal with the virus and malware shit again...

I haven't had to deal with malware or viruses for over a decade. If you have to on any windows box, you're doing it wrong.

But you've had to deal with preventing them.

No, preventing computer viruses is based around a lifestyle.   I don't get them either, because I am relatively smart about where I get my porn.  The most aggressive thing I run since ejecting AVG is NoScript.

Also, PowerShell comes with Win7.  Someone got their POSIX in my DOS!

[tgr]

But having to deal with the virus and malware shit again...

I haven't had to deal with malware or viruses for over a decade. If you have to on any windows box, you're doing it wrong.

But you've had to deal with preventing them.

No, preventing computer viruses is based around a lifestyle.  I don't get them either, because I am relatively smart about where I get my porn.  The most aggressive thing I run since ejecting AVG is NoScript.

I second that. I have only run AV once in a while just to verify, and it has yet to find anything. And it's been like that since I got my first PC (as in it was mine), 13-14 years ago.

I roll my eyes so hard they're close to popping out whenever someone gets the latest email virus. Hell, I even had to setup my mailserver to reject mails with passworded zipfiles in them, because so many idiots were getting hit by that virus, and I believe it had 6 manual steps the recipients had to perform. SIX.

I mean, god damn.

Also, PowerShell comes with Win7.  Someone got their POSIX in my DOS!

I'm desperately trying to refrain from pulling an "I herd you like..." here.

Edit: Spleling

[Delmania]

The Powershell was developed by some UNIX developers, or so I heard.   The difference is that the  UNIX command line is desiged to handle text files quickly (design goal of UNIX: everything can be configured via a text file) whereas the Powershell is designed around objects..

[JWIV]

The Powershell was developed by some UNIX developers, or so I heard.   The difference is that the  UNIX command line is desiged to handle text files quickly (design goal of UNIX: everything can be configured via a text file) whereas the Powershell is designed around objects..

I just about had heart failure when typing ls in the shell worked.   Thank christ they don't actually support the various flags or my brain would really melt.

PS C:\Users\Josh> ls
Directory: C:\Users\Josh
Mode         LastWriteTime     Length Name
----           -------------     ------ ----
d-r--        10/29/2009   6:47 PM            Contacts

[fuser]

Also, PowerShell comes with Win7.  Someone got their POSIX in my DOS!

7 also has the Powershell ISE installed which is terrific for scripting. Anyone who's doing some scripting take a look at Windows Powershell in Action by Bruce Payette (second edition is coming out soon to cover 2.0).

[Sky]

I just about had heart failure when typing ls in the shell worked.   

  I find myself doing that all the time in cmd on XP now. Thanks, OSX!

Though it looks like the verbose output, anyway, so ls -al is implied, yeah?

[Yegolev]

PowerShell is not Cygwin, so it is not really ls, it just looks like it.  Do `get-alias ls` to see it or `get-alias` to see all of them; you will see that ls is just an alias for get-childitem.  So, it is still .NET all the way through.  In fact, dir is also an alias for get-childitem.  This means that `ls` works to show you child items of anything, such as registry objects.

Furthermore, you can cd into weird things... like registry objects and the env: "drive".  So, hooray for everything looking like a filesystem.  Note: cd is an alias for set-location.



EDIT: as fuser alluded to, PowerShell can do anything VBScript can do, maybe more, and can do it with cleaner syntax.  Also: .NET native.

[Delmania]

The purpose of Powershell is to enable machine administrators to manage a machine using a command line as opposed to the windowing system, so enabling them to use the registry as if it were a directory makes sense.   Also, as I said, it's organized around objects and not text files likes the *NIX command shell is, so from that perspective all these weird things make sense. 

[Yegolev]

Just because I am a dork, I'll again mention that AIX has a "registry" but it does not have a gui.  This is either from or due to the joint work they did from which sprang OS/2 and WinNT.  So, more points for MS for finally passing IBM here.  The ODM uses a query mechanism and I find that I have to know what I am looking for before I go in there.

[fuser]

EDIT: as fuser alluded to, PowerShell can do anything VBScript can do, maybe more, and can do it with cleaner syntax.  Also: .NET native.

It can do amazing things as it has access to .NET libraries vs COM with JScript/VBScript. For example now I have a small app that's parsing an XML and using .NET to get access to a SQL database via ODBC to pull in further information to construct file output. If I really wanted to get fancy I'd try to build its output to a RESTful backend . It's really really really really nice coming from a Perl/Bash scripting background to finally have this framework on XP and better desktops.

[Lantyssa]

Just because I am a dork, I'll again mention that AIX has a "registry" but it does not have a gui.  This is either from or due to the joint work they did from which sprang OS/2 and WinNT.  So, more points for MS for finally passing IBM here.  The ODM uses a query mechanism and I find that I have to know what I am looking for before I go in there.

I'm not sure anything having a registry deserves points.

[Yegolev]

Just because I am a dork, I'll again mention that AIX has a "registry" but it does not have a gui.  This is either from or due to the joint work they did from which sprang OS/2 and WinNT.  So, more points for MS for finally passing IBM here.  The ODM uses a query mechanism and I find that I have to know what I am looking for before I go in there.

I'm not sure anything having a registry deserves points.

I suppose I meant "fewer demerits due to having a navigable interface".  I suppose there is some sort of technical merit to a registry hive, presumably robustness, but I don't know what it is specifically.

[Salamok]

Just because I am a dork, I'll again mention that AIX has a "registry" but it does not have a gui.  This is either from or due to the joint work they did from which sprang OS/2 and WinNT.  So, more points for MS for finally passing IBM here.  The ODM uses a query mechanism and I find that I have to know what I am looking for before I go in there.

I'm not sure anything having a registry deserves points.

From a home user standpoint having ini files and all your crap in 1 folder for each app has it's points but when trying to administer a network and maintain roaming profiles and policies I think I'll take the registry+active directory.

Edit: that said, my single biggest wish list item for windows since XP is a "Please get the fuck off my machine and take all your crap with you, do not try and reinstall, don't ask me to take a fucking survey and for fucks sake whatever you do don't ask for the original install files from the original install location as a criteria to uninstall!" add/remove program feature.

[Lantyssa]

Theoretically I can see uses for the registry.  Especially with many computers as you say.

In practice I'd rather it never existed and anyone who thinks of implementing one is horse whipped and dragged away to never be seen again.

[Sheepherder]

hkey_local_machine loves you too.

[Xerapis]

setup.exe error.  wrong volume.

please insert GRMCULXFRER_EN_DVD

I hate you all.

[schild]

I hate you all.

A common solution to an uncommon problem.